By Harry Haun
14 Nov 2008

"The show has gone through a lot of changes." (These words weigh heavily on Sondheim.) "It has essentially been on an out-of-town tryout since the late '90s.

"The first version was rather a goofy play, and it had a whole Hope-and-Crosby feeling to it, one of their 'Road' pictures where Crosby is the conner and Hope is the nerd patsy. That's not unlike Wilson to Addison. Wilson often left Addison holding the bag. We called it Wise Guys because it was indeed about a con man and his assistant. When Sam got hold of it, it became less goofy and more serious in content.

"For us, the love story had always been between the two brothers. When Hal did it, he thought that what it needed was a female lead. That seemed like an interesting idea so we sort of invented one. Nellie had been a small character in Wise Guys, and we blew her up into a major role. When the woman came into it, it became about resilience. That's when the idea of Bounceoccurred to me, and I wrote a title tune."

But having a woman on board proved a "Jonah" for the show. "It wasn't a disaster. It just wasn't what we wanted. We realized we'd made a terrible error by having this woman in the show so we reverted to what we had originally — but with all the stuff we had learned along the way — before Sam, during Sam, during Hal. We then got a new director who saw it pretty much the way we do. Now, it's swifter and funnier."

With this show, Sondheim and Weidman have emerged as models of resiliency themselves. "It occurred to John and me that we are, in fact, echoing the show in so many ways. This has been a long journey. The whole idea of the road is that it has many twists and turns you don't see. There are unexpectednesses that happen. One character will start out on one path and then end up on another one. Their paths keep constantly crossing, they keep osmosing into each other — that's the whole idea, and that's exactly what happened in the course of the history of this show.

"Here it is 14 years later, and we're still here, still bouncing. The only thing about the show is: It's a small show. You'd think that after working on a show intermittently, sporadically, for 14 years it would turn out to be Gotterdammerung — but it isn't.

"We ask ourselves all the time, 'What the hell are we doing, going back to this again?' We can't let it go. It's a story we both like, characters we both like, something we'd like to share with an audience. Simple as that. We don't want to let it die without sharing it with an audience. If the audience rejects it — all right. At least we shared it. And this time around — for the first time — we're sharing the story we want to tell."